entrepreneur

Valuable insights from guest writer Eddie Law, as he reflects on his 10-year entrepreneurship journey with eLawyer.

10 years ago, I was going through a challenging period in my legal career. One interviewer even bluntly said to me: “You change jobs like people change clothes”. Although I was very committed and worked hard, my career somehow was not going the way I wanted. I was in a state of despair, and kept asking God where I should go, and what I should do. I was upset, and felt lost.

I experienced a period of not having a stable full-time job. In the “extra free time” that I had, I started reading about e-commerce, blogging, and online businesses. I was fascinated with the power of the internet and the endless possibilities it offered. I started my own blog and exploring what opportunties there were online.

One day, the idea came to me to build a website as an online resource for Malaysian lawyers — this was how eLawyer.com.my was born, in November 2007!

To mark the 10-year anniversary of the launch of eLawyer (my co-founder was another tech entrepreneur, Larry Lam), I would like to share 10 things I have learned over this decade-long entrepreneurship journey:

I’m delighted to announce that my new book Law for Startups: What You Need to Know When Starting a Business will be available in all major bookstores from January 2017.

I’ve worked very hard together with my publisher, MPH Group Publishing, on this book throughout 2016, and the entire process—from ideation, to securing the publishing deal, writing the manuscript and sending it through the rigorous editorial process, through to the book design resulting in the end product that will be in stores—took less than a year.

This post by Chua Sher Hann is the first-ever guest-post on The Malaysian Lawyer.

The last few years saw a proliferation of startups in Malaysia. You can eat your Dah Makan lunchbox, then GrabCar to your KFit class decked in your Ash Be Nimble active wear. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur or the founder of a fresh startup, you must be extremely careful when navigating the intellectual property minefield, and not overlook the importance of securing the intellectual property rights of your business.

Unless you’re someone like Jeffri Cheong of Kaodim (who was an intellectual property lawyer prior to co-founding the services platform which recently raised USD 4 million in its Series A round) and already have a solid understanding and knowledge of intellectual property, please read on.

Here are five common intellectual property mistakes that startup founders make.